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ByteDance has begun grey testing Seedance 2.0 in its Doubao app, allowing select users to generate short (4–15s) multimodal videos that use images, audio and text as references. The staged rollout, short-duration limits and quota system show a cautious path to embedding advanced generative video tools into ByteDance’s creator ecosystem while managing technical and policy risks.

ByteDance has started a limited rollout of Seedance 2.0, a next‑generation video‑generation model, inside its Doubao AI assistant app. The grayscale test lets select users try the new model while ByteDance evaluates performance and safety before a wider release, with implications for creators, platform engagement and regulatory oversight.

Seedance 2.0, a Chinese generative video model, can produce hyper-realistic footage by integrating image, motion, audio and text, lowering the barriers to making sophisticated video. Its realism has sparked copyright backlash and deepfake concerns even as China’s large user base, open-source releases and supportive AI policy accelerate development and adoption.

Zhipu Technology raised prices for its GLM Coding Plan and launched GLM-5 overseas on February 12, citing surging developer demand and the need for heavier investment in compute and model optimisation. The increase — 30% or higher domestically and substantially larger on overseas API pricing — marks a shift in China’s AI industry from low‑price competition to value-based monetisation.

ByteDance has integrated its advanced video-generation model Seedance 2.0 into the Doubao app, letting users create short multi-shot videos from prompts and reference images. Early tests by creators show strong capabilities in multi-camera composition and audio-visual coherence, prompting excitement about creative democratization and concern about industry disruption, IP and ethical risks.

ByteDance has launched Doubao 2.0, a family of production‑oriented large models (Pro, Lite, Mini, and a Code variant) focused on efficient inference, multimodal ability and long‑chain task execution. The company claims strong benchmark performance versus rivals but faces scrutiny over IP and international review requests, highlighting the tension between rapid commercialisation and the need for independent validation and regulatory compliance.

Helion Energy says its Polaris prototype reached 150 million °C, a milestone the company frames as a three‑quarters step toward temperatures it considers necessary for commercial fusion. The firm pursues an FRC design and direct magnetic‑to‑electric conversion, targets a 50 MW Orion plant for Microsoft by 2028, and faces significant technical and fuel‑supply challenges before true commercialization.

China’s 2026 Spring Festival Gala has become a focal point for AI platforms and robotics firms seeking to convert national TV reach into user habits and investor momentum. While tech companies flood the event with prizes and live demonstrations, traditional sponsors such as baijiu distillers have sharply reduced their presence, underscoring a broader commercial shift toward hard tech.

Henan Mining Crane Co. announced Rmb180 million in year‑end bonuses — two‑thirds of its Rmb270 million profit — and staged a public cash‑counting event that distributed Rmb60 million on site. The spectacle mixes staff incentives, PR and political signalling, but raises practical questions about tax compliance, fairness and sustainability.

The 2026 US–Japan 'Iron Fist' amphibious exercise, running 11 February–9 March, is the largest yet and spans 19 sites in and around Okinawa. With deeper operational integration between US and Japanese commands, expanded amphibious forces and sharpened political rhetoric in Tokyo and Washington, the drills both bolster deterrence and raise regional risks of miscalculation.

Qianwen has launched a 3 billion yuan Spring Festival campaign, enlisting multiple Alibaba ecosystem services to offer free orders and large cash red packets aimed at turning AI from a chat tool into a transactional assistant. The push comes amid competition from rivals such as Yuanbao, which offered 1 billion yuan in red packets, and marks a broader pivot by Chinese platforms to embed AI into everyday commerce during the high-spend Lunar New Year period.

Mianbi Intelligence has released SALA, a hybrid sparse‑linear attention architecture, and a 9B model called MiniCPM‑SALA that claims large inference speed gains and support for up to one million token contexts. If independently validated, the design could make very long‑context applications feasible on mid‑sized models and a range of inference hardware.

ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 is a generative video model that creates multi-shot, 2K-quality sequences with synchronized audio from mixed media inputs and text prompts. Its release has provoked excitement over reduced production costs and creative possibilities, alongside sharp concerns from filmmakers, legal experts and market observers about job disruption, copyright and platform concentration.

China’s local governments saw land‑sale revenues fall for a fourth straight year in 2025, dropping to about ¥4.15 trillion and roughly halving since the 2021 peak. The slump has tightened municipal budgets, increased debt pressure and cut land‑related spending, prompting proposals for central fiscal backstops and targeted measures to stabilise the housing market in 2026.

Meituan’s 5 billion‑yuan acquisition of Dingdong Maicai ends the start‑up’s independent run and reflects a defensive, strategic push in China’s instant‑retail wars. The deal gives Meituan regional market share, warehouses and a curated sourcing capability, but integration risks diluting Dingdong’s locally tuned advantages as the sector consolidates ahead of another likely subsidy‑driven showdown in summer 2026.

Zhiyuan Robotics launched the full‑size YuanZheng A3 humanoid, showcasing continuous martial‑arts style moves and claiming up to eight hours of mixed‑use battery life. The machine pairs hardware upgrades with a multimodal interaction stack and a company‑backed data platform, signalling a push to convert spectacle into deployable service robots and to outflank rivals such as YushU.

Zhipu AI released GLM‑5 as open source on Feb. 11, and Haiguang DCU completed Day‑0 adaptation and joint fine‑tuning to provide immediate, deployable solutions for developers and enterprises. The move highlights accelerating integration between Chinese model creators and infrastructure providers, shortening the path from research release to commercial use.

An open‑source agent called OpenClaw has popularized always‑on, self‑executing AI workflows by running locally with broad control over devices and services. Its rapid spread exposed a new paradigm—delegated, 24/7 digital labour—that big cloud providers are racing to productize while security experts warn of multi‑layered, systemic risks.

Baidu and Tencent have launched multi‑hundred‑million‑yuan Spring Festival cash campaigns, coupling traditional digital red packets with AI demonstrations and ecosystem plays. The promotions highlight an emerging pattern: China’s tech giants are using culturally resonant incentives and AI showpieces to drive short‑term transactions and long‑term platform engagement, with implications for competition and regulation.

Three leading Chinese AI firms unveiled near‑simultaneous upgrades that signal a shift from demo‑level coding assistants to production‑oriented, agentic systems. Zhipu launched GLM‑5 as an open‑source foundation for long‑horizon engineering tasks, while MiniMax and DeepSeek pushed product and context upgrades aimed at real‑world throughput and extended interactions.

Alibaba’s Qianwen vaulted to 58.48 million daily users on day one of its Spring Festival cash giveaway, narrowing the gap with ByteDance’s Doubao and eclipseing Tencent’s Yuanbao. The spike underscores how massive subsidies can reconfigure app rankings quickly, but low retention figures suggest the gains may be fleeting unless platform AI capabilities and habit formation improve.

With the election days away, Sanae Takaichi’s surge in the polls has elevated constitutional revision and the formal enshrinement of the Self‑Defense Forces into central campaign issues. A parliamentary supermajority would make amendment feasible, with wide implications for domestic politics and regional security, drawing sharp responses from China and Russia.

China’s central bank will inject ¥10 trillion via a six‑month buyout reverse repo on 13 February to ensure ample banking liquidity. The move provides durable, medium‑term funding and signals a continued, measured easing stance aimed at supporting financing conditions and stabilising the economy.

China’s 2026 Spring Festival Gala became a de facto showcase for humanoid robotics, with four domestic firms presenting polished acrobatics, coordinated dance and domestic task demonstrations. The broadcast signalled that motion control and embodied intelligence are maturing, while shifting investor attention from hardware to the ‘brain’ — large embodied models and task‑general AI.

ByteDance will use the CCTV Spring Festival Gala to distribute cash and more than 100,000 AI-integrated tech prizes for its Doubao assistant, signaling a strategic pivot toward hardware-driven consumer AI. The campaign contrasts with rivals’ social and commerce-led plays and underscores a longer-term bet on devices as persistent AI touchpoints that can build user habits and edge data for model improvement.

A Chinese production platform for short, comic‑style episodic drama has integrated Seedance 2.0’s full feature set and plans to launch after Lunar New Year, enabling mass automated generation of video content. The integration accelerates automation in the creative chain, with commercial upside for rapid IP production and significant legal, ethical and regulatory risks around deepfakes, copyright and labour displacement.

Zhipu AI released GLM-5 and Moore Threads said it adapted the model to its MTT S5000 GPU the same day, claiming H100-class FP8 performance. Qianli Technology nominated former Honor CEO Zhao Ming to its board to speed commercialisation, while Alipay’s AI-native payments surpassed 120 million transactions in one week. Together these moves show China advancing a vertically integrated AI stack from hardware and models to monetised services.

The yuan climbed past 6.90 per dollar on February 12, reaching levels not seen since May 2023 as both onshore and offshore markets rallied. The move reflects softer dollar dynamics, renewed foreign inflows and cautious central-bank guidance via a conservative midpoint setting, but risks from U.S. policy shifts and domestic growth surprises remain.

A compact roundup of market‑moving technology and policy developments: Elon Musk outlined plans for lunar factories to build AI satellites, China launched seven satellites including Pakistan’s PRSC‑EO2, and Chinese researchers set a new speed record in millimetre‑scale 3D printing. Together with advances in embodied robotics models, quantum networking and targeted vocational reforms, these items illustrate accelerating commercialisation and strategic competition across space, AI and advanced manufacturing.

OpenAI has shared an open‑source voice‑to‑instruction model with two Pentagon‑selected defence firms competing in a prize to produce voice‑controlled drone‑swarm prototypes. The move highlights the tension between commercial AI innovation and the risks of rapid diffusion of components that can enable more autonomous and potentially weaponised systems.

China’s defence ministry rejected Taiwanese proposals to forward‑deploy HIMARS rocket systems and entertain pre‑emptive strikes, warning any attempt to provoke conflict would be met with annihilation. The exchange deepens cross‑Strait tensions, highlighting the risks of forward deployments, tight decision timelines, and potential miscalculation with the United States watching closely.

Alphabet issued a rare £1 billion, 100‑year sterling bond that was nearly ten times oversubscribed as part of a broader, multi‑currency debt programme that included a $20 billion dollar deal. The financing push supports massive AI and cloud capital spending and forms part of a larger wave of tech corporate borrowing that may push 2026 issuance to record levels.

President Isaac Herzog rebuked Donald Trump after the former U.S. president urged him to pardon Benjamin Netanyahu. Herzog’s retort underscored the independence of Israel’s presidential office and highlighted tensions between foreign political pressure and domestic legal procedures concerning Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial.

Yushu Technology CEO Wang Xingxing says embodied intelligence — AI embodied in robots and edge devices — is in its early platform phase but could surpass the mobile internet in scale and economic impact. Scaling will depend on industrial innovation in hardware, safety standards and supply chains rather than software breakthroughs alone.

Donald Trump criticized Israeli President Isaac Herzog for not pardoning Benjamin Netanyahu, after a White House meeting between Trump and Netanyahu. Herzog’s office said a legal review is ongoing and that any pardon decision will be made independently and in the national interest, underscoring tensions between political pressure and judicial process in Israel.

Alibaba used a RMB3 billion promotion through its Qianwen app to orchestrate 10 million milk‑tea orders in nine hours, demonstrating the company’s full‑stack AI capability. By combining in‑house models, cloud infrastructure and proprietary silicon with deep integration across its consumer ecosystem, Alibaba showcased a path from generative models to agentic, real‑world execution.

SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon on 13 February from Florida, ferrying four astronauts to the International Space Station for an eight‑month mission centered on experiments that support lunar and Mars exploration, such as plant–bacteria research to improve food production. The flight highlights the growing role of commercial providers in sustaining human presence in low Earth orbit and testing technologies needed for deep‑space missions.

Gazans are manually searching collapsed buildings for the remains of relatives due to limited access to heavy machinery and restricted recovery operations since the October 2025 ceasefire. Local authorities say roughly 8,000 people remain under rubble while only about 700 bodies have been recovered, underscoring both humanitarian and forensic challenges in post-conflict recovery.

China has issued stringent new rules that ban the overseas issuance of renminbi‑pegged stablecoins without approval and place heavy restrictions on tokenizing domestic assets for issuance abroad. The policy bundle, coordinated by the central bank and eight departments and accompanied by CSRC guidance on RWA tokenization, closes perceived regulatory gaps while creating a filing pathway for compliant projects.

xAI co‑founder Jimmy Ba announced he will leave the company, thanking Elon Musk and saying he will remain close to the team. He warned that 2026 will be an exceptionally consequential year for global development, underscoring the high stakes facing AI companies.

Elon Musk outlined plans to build AI satellites and factories on the Moon, signalling a push to relocate compute and manufacturing off Earth. China concurrently demonstrated launch prowess, published breakthroughs in 3D printing and quantum networking, and saw strong commercial AI activity — developments that together tighten the links between technology, markets and strategic competition.

China has begun rapid construction of a new carrier, hull 004, projected at about 120,000 tonnes and likely nuclear‑powered. The ship would carry a significantly larger air wing and upgraded flight‑deck systems, enabling longer deployments and higher sortie rates that expand Beijing’s ability to project naval power.

Several Chinese municipal market regulators have ordered food-delivery platforms to halt low-price, subsidy-driven “involution” ahead of the Spring Festival, banning predatory subsidies, ‘‘choose-one’’ exclusivity, data-based price discrimination and coercive promotional tactics. The measures aim to protect small merchants, restore market order during a high-demand period, and push platforms to shift from capital-driven growth to value creation.

ByteDance has declared its 2026 priority: make the Doubao/Dola AI assistant the central interface that links its consumer apps and cloud services. The company has scaled user adoption rapidly, advanced its model capabilities and pushed into phone‑level automation, but now faces fierce competition from Alibaba and Tencent, regulatory scrutiny, and practical permission barriers from other app and device owners.

NetEase reported that OpenAI is named in competing Pentagon bids to supply voice‑to‑digital translation for drone‑swarm command software, a narrowly defined role that stops short of direct control or targeting. The work is part of a $100m Pentagon prototype challenge to field autonomous swarms, raising technical, ethical and geopolitical questions about the integration of generative AI into weapons systems.

Haiguang Information’s DCU has completed Day‑0 adaptation and joint fine‑tuning of Zhipu AI’s newly open‑sourced GLM‑5 model, using its DTK stack to optimise operators and hardware acceleration. The move highlights China’s push to pair domestic models with domestic compute, reducing reliance on foreign accelerators and accelerating production deployment.

Hengrui Medicine and Kailera Therapeutics reported positive top‑line results from a 166‑participant Phase II trial of ripubopetide, an oral GLP‑1/GIP dual agonist, showing up to 12.1% mean weight loss at 26 weeks and manageable vomiting rates. Hengrui will pursue Phase III studies in China while Kailera plans a global Phase II in 2026, though larger, longer trials are needed to confirm efficacy and safety.

Meituan has acquired Dingdong Maicai’s China business for an initial $717 million, absorbing a network of over 1,000 front-line warehouses and more than seven million monthly users. The deal strengthens Meituan’s instant-grocery capabilities and reflects broader consolidation as high fulfilment costs and thin margins push standalone fresh-retail specialists into the arms of platform giants.

Rapid advances in AI video tools have slashed production costs and unleashed a surge of short animated dramas in China, but oversupply has driven hit rates below 5% and forced the industry out of its early ‘easy‑money’ phase. The market is now shifting from volume to IP‑driven, platform‑bound business models, with interactive formats, overseas distribution and B2B brand work seen as the most promising routes to sustainable revenue.

Guotou’s Silver LOF hit its fifth straight limit‑down after trading resumed, with the market quote falling to ¥3.099 and a still‑elevated premium of 28.73%. The collapse reflects a wider silver sell‑off, late NAV adjustments and structural liquidity shortfalls in commodity‑linked funds, prompting probable regulatory scrutiny and calls for reforms in valuation and market‑making practices.